


with careful calculation

by orphan_account



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: F/M, although it's not really jake/anyone else, it's pretty much jake holding a candle for amy and trying to convince himself that he isn't lol
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-23
Updated: 2015-05-23
Packaged: 2018-03-31 21:50:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3994147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The elevator doors open and Jake knows that this is the moment everything changes.</p><p>(Or, a female police captain arrives.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	with careful calculation

**Author's Note:**

> for the record, i envision the captain to be rashida jones, and her assistant to be aubrey plaza.
> 
> sort of a companion piece to http://ginalinettti.tumblr.com/post/119265479512/

“Okay,” Jake says, and takes a steady breath, setting aside all that’s happened with Amy, Holt, everything. An entirely new pebble is about to be dropped, entirely new ripples are about to be set in motion, and this time, he’s going to be ready for it.

“Here we go.”

Jake knows, as they all do, that everything in their world is going to change forever in this one instant.

The first thing they see of their new captain – or, rather, hear – is the sound her boots make against the floor. Click, click, click. She’s walking backward as she talks animatedly to the person who’s come up in the elevator with her, a cup of coffee that threatens to spill over in one hand and a barely-eaten bagel in the other.

The person she’s talking to clears her throat. The captain turns quickly and the smile that springs to her face is just as quick and fleeting.

Jake gives her the once-over and can practically feel the rest of the precinct doing the same thing. She’s all ombre hair and smoky eyes and impish grins and, in short, nothing you’d ever expect a police captain to be. Hell, you wouldn’t expect a yoga instructor to look like she does. The only thing that keeps Jake from blurting out “Sorry, ma’am, the Starbucks is a block away” is the well-fitted captain’s outfit.

He’s never seen it on a woman before. She doesn’t boast as many badges as Captain Holt did – but, then again, she looks about thirty.

“Hello, Nine-Nine,” she says in tones that are a little husky and ringing with mirth that doesn’t quite fit in with the environment. She’s made up of soft, warm, gentle browns that contrast with the cold whites and blues of the precinct.

It’s odd – somehow, all these contradictions are adding up to something that’s actually kind of perfect.

“My name is Katharine Beckett. Wait.” A snap of the fingers. “Captain Katharine Beckett.”

The girl standing behind her smirks a little, sticking very close to the captain, hands deep in the pockets of her – Jesus Christ, she’s wearing an honest-to-god trench coat. Her hair is dark and her eyes are darker as she scans the detectives watching them, looking as though she’s biting back scathing remarks about each one of them.

Jake’s immediate thought is ‘Oh, man, Gina would’ve loved these two’.

Captain Beckett drops both her coffee and her bagel – just drops them, with completely blatant disregard, and the girl standing behind her catches them both with an expression of almost off-putting neutrality. Jake sees Amy’s lips tighten out of the corner of his eye. The Captain rubs her hands together, looking around at all of them expectantly as though she’s waiting for them to do or say something of significance, before having a sudden realization and saying: “This is my personal assistant, Laura.”

She does not offer a surname, nor does Laura seem eager to add on to her words and enlighten them with it.

“Alright!” The captain walks forward, stopping just in front of Jake, and looks around at all of them. “What about you? Names? Gender identifications? Weird habits?”

Introductions are made, sans weird habits, which seems to satisfy her. With a semi-imperious wave of the hand, she dismisses them and heads into her office with Terry trailing behind – presumably to give her a bit of a rundown as to how things work here. Laura sits down at Gina’s old desk, puts her feet up on the desk, and immediately begins to use her phone.

At least something hasn’t changed.

 

“So,” Amy asks, looking up at him. The topic of their kiss in the evidence lock-up lingers between them, so insignificant and so suffocating at the same time. Jake waits to see what she’ll say next. She hesitates, as though trying to decide what she’s supposed to say next, fingers tapping a quiet rhythm on the desk.

She always does that when she’s unsure, Jake knows. There are things he knows about her that even she might not.

“Um – what do you think of Captain Beckett?”

Jake stops himself from looking at her mouth. Or, actually, from looking at her anywhere. When he looks at her, he’s just reliving of the evidence lock-up, how she feels against him, how soft her lips are, how her hands feel on the nape of his neck. So he looks at his computer monitor, stares directly at the blank blueness that is his desktop.

“Uh, I’m guessing she probably worked a desk job before Wuntch randomly assigned her to be our captain. Doesn’t seem like she has a lot of experience in a precinct. Plus, she’s, like, really short.”

“Oh,” Amy replies, and swallows quietly.

They don’t talk very much for the rest of the day, but just as Jake’s packing up to leave, Amy stops him and tells him that she wants to talk. His heart immediately doubles in speed as he asks, almost breathlessly: “Can we not do this while Beckett’s still sitting in her office? It’s just … weird.”

“No, it’s fine,” Amy says, and her tone does not bode well, nor does the fact that she’s looking at nearly everything but him. Jake’s throat feels dry as she continues: “This won’t take very long.”

“Okay.”

“It’s just – you know, with the new captain, and Holt leaving, and everything happening all at once, I’m just … I don’t feel like I’m ready for something serious.”

There have been books and songs and poems written about it, but _nothing_ could have possibly prepared Jake for what the words feel like to him. They feel like being punched right in the chest, like having his heart ripped in two, and breath doesn’t come as easily to him as she barrels on.

“It’s not you, no, Jake, I promise, you’re great, and I really do like you, but I’m going to need time to adjust to all this change, and I really want our relationship to stay the same through all of that. Please don’t wait for me – I promise, I promise, this isn’t your fault at _all_ – ”

And no, she means well, but it’s hurting, it’s burning, and Jake clenches his jaw, trying to stop himself from bursting, because all his feelings have been building up for so long and now, right on the cusp of being alleviated, they’re exploding from him, turning him inside out.

“If you’re still there when I’m ready,” Amy says, and looks down at her feet. “Then we can try to make it work.”

He wants to kiss her, he wants to hold her, he wants to bare his goddamn soul to her, he wants to let her know all the things he feels for her, but the only thing he does is look at her and say: “Okay.”

Amy smiles-but-not-quite and leaves.

 

The next day, Captain Beckett sits down next to Jake and Amy’s desks and smiles the kind of smile that doesn’t belong in a place where finding bags of severed fingers is considered “all in a day’s work” and there’s a bag containing 40,000 dollars of cocaine sitting on Jake’s desk.

“So, Detectives,” she says. “You guys have some kind of friendly rivalry going on, or something?”

“Yeah,” Jake replies, more out of obligation than anything else. “I mean, it was a lot more rival-y and less friendly when Captain Holt first got here, but now – um, I guess we’re on better terms.”

Amy glances at him for the briefest moment before returning her attention to the captain, who looks far too pleased to be there. “Great! Well. I’m looking forward to seeing how you two work together as partners. Hope that little rivalry won’t get in the way of anything.”

 _“I don’t think that’s what’ll get in the way of it”,_ Jake wants to say, but settles for a small shrug and a noncommittal noise as she stands and turns.

“Pencil-pusher,” he whispers to Amy, who looks up at him with the ghost of a smile on her face. The captain looks like she might be about to turn around for a moment, but thinks better of it and walks away after all. Jake doesn’t notice.

 

The awkwardness between him and Amy is truly suffocating all through the day, so the day after, Jake goes directly to the gym in the morning, not quite sure what he’d even do there. When he enters, the first thing he sees is Captain Beckett, sitting by the punching bags and tying her hair into a ponytail.

Before he can rethink his life and leave, she spots him.

“Peralta!”

Jake wishes he was never born and forces himself to go over to her. “Captain.”

“Are you here to – ” Her brow creases as she looks down at the boxing gloves hanging loosely from his hand. “You’re here to work out?”

“Uh, yeah,” Jake says; just because she seems incredibly inexperienced doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to be on her good side. Having the captain like you does pay off, after all. “Definitely.”

“You wanna spar?”

Jake studies her skeptically, looking for anything to indicate that she isn’t being serious, but even though she’s still smiling a little, the expression in her eyes is steely and she wears an expression similar to the one Amy gets when she does the newspaper crosswords.

It might be the thought of Amy, and the desperation to banish it, that leads him to say: “Sure.”

When they’re standing in the rink, she’s brushing hair out of her face as Jake says, more out of sympathy than anything else – “Captain, I should mention that I’m, like, the equivalent of a black belt in boxing, so if you want me to go easy on you, then – ”

She slugs him in the face. Hard. _Twice._

Jake goes reeling. To his credit, he doesn’t shout, although that might just be because his entire body – including his vocal cords – seize up.

 

“I’m really sorry,” the captain says afterwards. “But you did call me a pencil-pusher yesterday.”

“Oh,” Jake mumbles, lying on the floor of the rink, both hands over his face. “So you heard that.”

She says he can come into work late if he wants, and that she’s sorry, again.

 

Jake walks into her office when he comes into work at ten, after an hour of moping and massaging his nose. She looks up at him and closes her laptop lid. “Peralta.”

“Captain,” he returns. “Look, I just – I wanted to apologize for – ”

“– calling me a pencil-pusher?” A wry smile. “Listen, Peralta, not a lot of us got here just by filing forms. I didn’t get my first command at thirty-five for nothing.”

“Thirty-five?” Jake can’t stop himself from blurting out. “Jesus.”

The smile becomes something more real. “Right. It’s fine, I mean – you know. People at Eight-Five didn’t think I could handle it either. But here I am. No clue why Deputy Chief Wuntch decided to transfer me, but … I’m here now, which is something both of us will have to get used to.”

“Right,” Jake says. “Captain.”

“Detective,” she replies. “Can I call you Jake?”

 

Whenever new cases come up, Amy constantly finds her own and deems them more crucial than the ones Jake’s working on to avoid having to spend time with him. After a few days, they’re stretched thin enough for Jake to find himself standing next to Captain Beckett in the hallway outside a potential perp’s apartment.

“Watch my back,” Jake says, and prepares to break down the door. He’s just about to do it when she puts a hand on his arm.

“I haven’t been out in the field in a long time,” Beckett says. “Can I do this one?”

“Uh,” is Jake’s stunned response. “Okay.”

He gets ready to break down the door anyway, in the event that she fails, but she stretches her legs and kicks it down with ease.

“Boom!” Beckett shouts as they rush in, guns raised.

Jake looks over at her and realizes that he might like her, a little.

 

(He doesn’t like her, obviously.)

(Not in _that_ way.)

(He admires her a great deal, enjoys her presence, would probably sit down to a movie marathon with her.)

(But there are no butterflies in his stomach whenever she talks to him, and his heart does not skip any beats when she walks into the room.)

(With time, he thinks, these things might happen.)

(They never will. But he doesn’t know that.)

(The only thing Jake knows is that he likes Captain Beckett.)

 

The captain spends a lot of time sitting by his and Amy’s desks. Amy seems to like her well enough, now that she’s settled into things – she, too, enjoys crossword puzzles and telling people off for leaving the microwave dirty. Beckett constantly makes conversation with her, which Amy looks like she enjoys – partially because it’s a reason not to have to look at or talk to Jake.

Their relationship is much more strained now than it used to be; Jake is still reeling from the heartbreak (although he’d never refer to it as such) and she’s still reeling from the – he doesn’t know what.

It wouldn’t have hurt so badly, he thinks, if she hadn’t kissed him back like she did.

 

Over the coming months, Jake and Amy get better at their relationship. They start being able to joke around again. Jake makes sex tape quips. Amy admonishes him with mirth in her eyes. They get better.

“You should ask her out,” Beckett tells Jake in hushed tones every so often.

Jake looks over at Amy, thinks about the kiss and the heartache and the _I don’t feel like I’m ready for something serious,_ and says: “Yeah, maybe.”

 

“Um,” Beckett says, standing in front of her office, seven months into her stint as their captain. “May I have your attention, please?”

The precinct stops and turns to look at her.

“I’m being transferred away, effective immediately,” she announces, handing Laura her coffee mug.

“Really?” Amy blurts out, looking a little panicked. “Who’s going to be our new captain? Why are you leaving? What’s happening?”

Beckett appraises her for a while before replying: “Well, I don’t know for sure, but it’s very likely that you’re going to be getting your old captain back. The one before me. Laura and I are both going to be leaving you. I’m taking you all out for drinks tonight. Three drink maximum. Dismissed.”

Jake is glad that she won’t ever know that the uproar that follows is more due to the news that Holt is returning than the free drinks – although those are pretty good, too.

 

She’s leaning against the wall in the back of the bar when Jake finds her. A small smile.

“You can call me Katharine now,” she says.

“Katharine,” Jake tries, and smiles. “It’s better than Captain.”

“I’d hope so,” Beckett – _Katharine_ – says, and crosses her arms, tilting her head back to rest it against the wall. “Are you glad to be getting your old captain back?”

“Sure,” Jake replies. “But we’re sorry to see you go, too.”

“Oh, you don’t have to pretend,” Katharine says, half-joking, and makes an attempt at laughter. “It was only ever a matter of time, anyway.”

They make eye contact, and she wets her lips, and then, just like that, Jake has her by the waist and he’s kissing her, without the captain-detective dynamic to keep them apart; he’s pulling her to her tiptoes, relishing the total lack of alcohol on her breath, and it goes on for a few moments before she puts a hand on his chest and pulls away.

He’ll notice, afterwards, that she didn’t kiss him back.

Dropping back down to stand properly on her feet, Katharine lets out a strangled laugh. “My God, Jake, you are making this harder than it needs to be.”

“What?”

“You don’t like me,” she says. “Not in that way, anyway. Not as much as you like Amy. In fact – I don’t think you’ll _ever_ like anyone as much as you like Amy.”

“Katharine – ”

“No, God, Jake, you don’t get it. In real life, love triangles are – stupid and misinterpreted and the choice is much easier to make than you’d think.”

“But,” Jake continues, dumbfounded, determined to have his say. “But you’re the one I choose.” (Is she?)

Katharine looks down at the floor and presses her lips together. “That’s not your decision to make.”

“I thought – I thought you might like me,” Jake confesses, finally regaining his senses and stepping away from her, although the faint ringing in his ears does not quite disappear. “You spent a lot of time sitting by our desks.”

Katharine smiles-but-not-really.

“Not _you,_ Jake.”

It all falls into place, and Jake realizes all of a sudden that this was never about him at all.

“I just want Amy to be happy, Jake,” she says. “You’re the only one who can actually _give_ her that.”

“Amy,” Jake says, and her name sounds like a prayer on his tongue.

“Amy,” Katharine repeats. “We picked a real winner.”

He smiles at her, pats her on the arm. “You’ll find a girl as uptight and out-of-date as she is. Or – or a guy. Either. Doesn’t matter.”

 

“Jake,” Amy says over the phone that night.

“Amy?”

“I think – I might be ready.”

“Oh,” Jake says, and stares up at his ceiling. “Me, too.”

**Author's Note:**

> @mikeschur PLS cast rashida jones


End file.
